In Conversation

Manda: Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods. To the podcast where we believe that another world is still possible and that if we all work together, there is still time to lay the foundations of that flourishing future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. I’m Manda Scott, your host and fellow traveller in this journey into possibility. And this week we have two guests, both of whom are living absolutely at that sharp, bright edge of inter becoming from which our more flourishing future will emerge. Rachel Butler is the founder of tiny House community, Bristol, chair of the Bristol Community Land Trust, and is a member of Bristol’s One City Homes and Communities Board. As you’ll hear, her root mission is within systems change and paradigm shift to recommon as much land as practical, enabling as many people as possible to move back onto and reconnect with this land, by co-creating and co residing in tiny house regenerative settlements. She believes that at this critical time of human created poly crisis, as the current system collapses and composts, it’s also time for the human species to rejoin the web of life in sacred reciprocity, healing our relationships to self, each other, and community. Not only human, but of all beings and kinds. Mary Longhurst is also a director of tiny House community, Bristol, and for the last 4 to 5 years, she has been helping to create their tiny house development in Sea Mills, as well as another tiny house community off the radar.

Manda: Since being forced to leave her rented home this August, she and her daughter have decided to leave the mainstream housing system so that they are no longer subject to its unethical, exploitative ways and instead are living, for now, in the fertile margins until their tiny houses are created. She is actually living everything that we talk about. Alongside this, she’s the UK coordinator of the Urban Agriculture Consortium, weaving relationships between people working in the urban and peri urban agro ecological transition. She’s also studio coordinator for Constructivist, a regenerative design school for built environment professionals, and part of the strategy circle for Bristol Commons. Some of her current areas of work are on reimagining the greenbelt as a place for regenerative settlements, prototyping landed community kitchens and developing a model for tiny homes for land regenerators in the city.

Manda: As you can well imagine, our conversation ranged from how grinding bureaucracy so often gets in the way of genuinely restorative, regenerative practice, to the philosophy and practices that are the foundations of the change we actually need to see in the world. We explored the social technologies that move things forward and learned of two workshops that sound totally transformative. Although since we did the recording, it’s become apparent that the one in Bristol with El Juego is not really open to other participants, which is sad, but I have no doubt they’ll be back, and that Maddy and Rachel will be able to engage with their teaching and bring it to life here and elsewhere.

Manda: The other workshop is Fearless Cities in Sheffield. It’s the weekend of the second and 3rd of November, and I’ve put a link in the show notes. And if I do get to go, I swear I will be at a microphone in time for the Ask Me Anything gathering in the Accidental Gods membership later that day, really I will. This is also a good time to remind you that the online gathering, Dreaming Your Death Awake is on the last Sunday of October, as close to Samhain as we could get. So that’s the 27th of October from 4:00 till 8:00 UK time and that’s still British summer time. It’s on zoom and anyone can come. You do not have to be a member of the Accidental Gods project to come along. There is a link in the show notes or you go to accidentalgods.life and find the gatherings tab. So there we go. Now let’s head into the show. People of the podcast, please do welcome Rachel Butler and Maddie Longhurst of the Bristol Tiny House community.

Manda: Good morning, Rachel and Maddie, and thank you for joining us on Accidental. Gods. So we are in three separate places. So to get everybody keyed in, Rachel, could you tell us who you are and where you are and a little bit about what brings you to the call? Over to you.

Rachel: Good morning. Manda. Yes, I’m well, thank you. There’s always a little bit of a background unwellness for me because I have a chronic health condition. However, you know, I’m having a reasonable day to day, which is good.

Manda: It’s 11:00 on Monday morning. If you were not having a reasonable day by now, that would be very bad. Thank you.

Rachel: And I’m on a call in Bristol. And to tell you a little bit about myself; I think sometimes it helps for me to share a very short story when an old manager of mine once came up to me and said, Rachel, who are you? I’ve just been looking at your CV and you’ve done so many different things and I can’t work out who you are. So I thought that was really interesting. And so that speaks to me spending most of my adult life trying to find myself. And following a breakdown in 2010 2011, I was afforded the opportunity to find myself. I was very ill at that point. However, I’ve been going up and up and up ever since then. I found my purpose. Find myself founding an organisation, now on the board of Bristol One City Homes and Communities. And also for about two weeks now, I’ve been the chair of Bristol Community Land Trust.

Manda: Oh, excellent.

Rachel: Yeah. So I think I’ve found my thing and well I know I have, because I feel it in my heart and in my bones. And yeah, it’s very nice. It’s never too late to find yourself.

Manda: Yay! it isn’t, is it? That intersection where your heart’s greatest joy meets the world’s greatest need.

Rachel: Exactly.

Manda: Excellent. And I found you through the Bristol Tiny House community. I think that’s worth saying. So everything is connected to everything else. So, Maddy, how are you? Where are you? And who are you this Monday morning?

Maddy: Thanks. Morning. Yeah I’m well. A bit Monday morning ish, having been down visiting a beautiful farm over the weekend, that’s looking for co owners. So I went to investigate that. So that was nice. But I’m back in the city, I’m in Bristol, at home about three minutes walk away from Rachel. Pretty much neighbours. And yeah we’ve been working together, Rachel and I, on Tiny House Community Bristol as co-directors for the last 4 or 5 years. And Developing that as an organisation, as a community, as a project together, converging our purposes. I also have a couple of paid jobs as well. One is as co-coordinator, one of two coordinators, of the Urban Agriculture Consortium. So that’s a small organisation that is kind of leaning into the emerging future around urban agroecology and transformation, food justice, working with partners across the UK and then also working with a sort of regenerative design school called Constructivist, who run these six month design labs for built environment professionals. Many moons ago my degree was in planning, so I’ve always been interested in how land use decisions are made, how our environments change, and why. And according to who, and who has the power in that? Who has the say? Who makes the decisions? And how does that all play out in our environment? And a lot of those things come together in Tiny House and that designing of low impact cooperative communities or settlements really. And how we sustain ourselves and build resilience and resilience capacities across all all systems really. But like Rachel, I like kind of being in that emergent space, kind of the fertile margins, you know, is a good home. So yeah, it’s really lovely to be here with you both.

Manda: Thank you. There’s so much in that. I am restraining myself from going down the urban agriculture route, but I do want to do that. But because we started with tiny housing and that core question; when we spoke in our pre podcast call, you both said that one of the key questions was how do we take back agency? How do we relearn how to fulfil our own needs in community? And that seemed to me then an absolutely core question that our political leaders don’t seem to be asking. The Labour government’s got this commitment to 1.5 million new homes without defining how, where or even particularly why. Or the structures or how do we do that within a commitment to net zero. And I’m not committed to net zero as a concept, I think it has huge numbers of holes, but they haven’t even addressed that. There isn’t even that much joined up thinking. And you two seem to me to be part of the joined up thinking, really looking at resilience and agency and who controls what, and that having a safe, dry, functional place to live that you can love, is a fundamental human right and a part of building community. And that both of you know this and both of you are working really deep in the woods of this pretty much all of the time. And you both seem to be part of quite a lot of interlocking organisations in Bristol, which itself seems to be a really alive place when it comes to looking at agency and community and building community and what does it take. So, Rachel, we’ll come to you first. Can you tell us a little bit about the Tiny House Community, what it is, why you are a part of it and how it arose and what its aims are and how it’s trying to fulfil it. And then we’ll take the conversation from there.

Rachel: Yeah, sure. So probably starting with how it arose, first of all would be a good place to start. And I was in a period of recovering from being very poorly. I’d been dabbling with a little bit of entrepreneurial things and hiring out teeny tiny caravans to the likes of Glastonbury Festival, etc. and the next iteration of that was going to be a mobile community of them doing the festival scene. And just before I started developing that idea, I met a homeless young man on the streets of Bristol, and it hit me very hard in the stomach and in the heart, and I didn’t want to leave him. And I sat down with him for quite some time and talked with him and heard his story. And that was the moment when I decided that it wasn’t mobile teeny tiny caravans for glamping at festivals that was required. It was tiny homes for people who’d fallen through the net or who are about to fall through the net. And there was something very strong coming through for me around that. And we can do this for ourselves and we can help each other. And at the time, I was learning more about climate change and about biodiversity loss and the six out of nine planetary boundaries that have been overshot. And I think I was starting to learn that I think in a systems thinking way quite naturally. And as Maddie was saying, you know, it’s the sort of transformative innovation space that I seem to feel most at home in. And and I was also learning about the tiny house movement as well.

Rachel: And so everything came together in that moment. And I realised that it was tiny house communities that we needed. Perhaps some of them need to be more therapeutic to help the likes of this lad I met. And then I set about creating that and wrote first of all to Marvin Rees, who was newly our mayor of Bristol. And he was just in office and on his mission to build as much affordable housing as possible. And so he put me on to his lead for housing in the city, who was Paul Smith at that time, and then I set about integrating with the grassroots people in the city, and the work they were doing. I came across Bristol Community Land Trust, Melissa Mean over at We Can Make in Knowle West and just sort of started turning up to every housing event I possibly could. And then over the years, bringing people together, just ordinary citizens in Bristol and surrounding areas, to meet and talk and start to identify what’s most alive for people. And the main themes coming through were the obvious ones around affordability and security. But there were also equally strong voices coming through around mental health, isolation, lack of resilience, fear and sort of this feeling that we were all behaving and operating in the world as individuals. And actually, we didn’t know how to do much for ourselves anymore. In some parts of the world, if a couple in a village get married, the community build them a house in a day.

Rachel: So that’s not what we have here. So I’ve been working in that space and thinking very deeply about all of the aspects that come up for me around it and realising that we really are in quite a predicament now. We’re so reliant on everybody, you know, other people doing things for us and expecting that. And when it goes wrong, expecting government central and local to sort it out for us. So for me, it’s about how do we take back our agency? How do we relearn these skills? How do we heal ourselves, our relationships, our community and come together in a way that is regenerative and healing? And healing of the land as well. The metaphor we’ve often used is lifeboats for what’s coming, because our current system is collapsing and composting. How do we create the lifeboats and then join the lifeboats up to form life rafts? And we’re linking up across the city, across the region, recreating those platforms that we’re no longer going to fall through. Where we are learning how to resolve and transform conflict, for example. How do we make decisions together? All of these things that I’ve realised through my work that we’ve lost a lot of the ability to do these things, and it’s absolutely fundamental to relearn. I often say that the paperwork is the real work, and the tiny house communities will naturally follow from that. So yeah, there’s a lot of work to be done.

Manda: Definitely. Brilliant. Thank you. So, Maddy, I think let’s have a look at what a tiny house actually is. Why is it tiny? Why is it a house? What are the parameters that make a tiny house function as that? And what is the vision for a tiny house community that you want to bring to Bristol? Over to you.

Maddy: So there isn’t a specific technical definition of what a tiny house is. It’s more a set of principles and kind of a human scale response to the housing crisis, to how we house ourselves and how we create community and find shelter affordably and beyond housing as a commodity. So it’s really a set of principles around living lightly on the earth, around living within our means, whatever they are, and having a having a very minimal impact on the Earth’s resources. So a lot of our motivation for this project is around knowing how we are overshooting planetary boundaries and the urgent need to sort of prototype ways that we do housing in a sort of nature led way. What does nature first housing look like? And housing that brings us within the means of having one planet.

Manda: And what does it look like? Insofar as you’ve got there, what does nature first housing look like in the UK in 2024?

Maddy: So for us, it’s a combination of the materials that we use, the opportunities that there are to remediate land, to uncover soils. We’re working in urban areas and the site that we’ve got is very contaminated and covered in tarmac and so on. So a lot of the work that we can do there is to sort of re liberate and clean up the soil and create more habitat around where we live. But it’s also about reducing our consumption, reducing our waste. It’s also about sharing resources, the materials that we use and the methods that we use to build. And trying to look to our more local or regional economy about how we source things, how we source materials. How we source expertise, how we source our our food and what we do with our waste and all of those sorts of material flows through our lives. Trying to look at all of those and reassess all of those. And how do we reimagine those as a community.

Manda: That’s brilliant.

Maddy: Yeah, it’s been a really interesting process of bringing people together who are naturally attracted to the tiny house principles, who are in housing need, and together working out what is the vision for Tiny House Community Bristol and what’s our mission, what are our aims? And that gives us as a sort of emerging community, gives us a direction of travel for the project. Our North Star or our maypole that we can all dance around, essentially. And which ribbons are we going to take? Everybody has a different skill to bring, a different dance to do. And we can’t any one of us achieve it on our own, we need that diversity of skill and diversity of character and of opinion and of background. But there is something that joins us around these around these principles and the ethics of doing Housing as a commons and not as a commodity.

Manda: Right. Beautiful. All right, so let’s come back to Rachel. Rachel, I’m still trying to build a picture in my head of what a tiny house might look like. So running with what Maddy just said, I’m imagining using more wood than concrete, say, and partly because I just listened to another podcast with the gentleman who made the film Holy Shit, and he’s really into composting toilets, and apparently there are entire apartment blocks in Geneva that are now running with composting toilets. And I came back all excited and spoke to a friend and she said, yeah, we’ve got one they’re horrible we hate it. So actually, what is the practicalities of composting toilets? Is that the kind of thing that we’re looking at? And the other question I’d like to ask you is with the maypole, I love that as a metaphor; we’re all dancing, we all have different ribbons, we all bring different things. How do you manage that? Because my fear of that kind of thing is that you end up with magnolia walls because you just default to the lowest common denominator, and I think there must be much better ways of decision making. But I’m really curious about the social technologies that actually work, so that you can end up with something that isn’t as bland as everybody is not objecting to, whatever it is. There must be better ways of doing stuff than that. So tell us what your ultimate tiny house is made of, and how it functions and how you get to that decision. Rachel.

Rachel: Yeah. So thank you for that question. That’s a great one. So the traditional tiny house that most people who know about the movement around the world would imagine, a very small, quite use the word cute, sort of literally like a miniature looking house, which is on a trailer which has wheels, and that with a vehicle with a strong enough engine, you can tow it around.

Manda: Is that to get around planning laws, or is that just because that’s practical?

Rachel: Well, I think it’s both/and, and for lots of other reasons as well. And this is something that we’ve started thinking about for our next project, because in terms of resilience, there’s one aspect to having a house that you can move around, which is very resilient. And if there’s something coming, something happening weather wise or flooding wise, you can move your house out of the way.

Manda: If you get enough warning. We’re recording this the day after Hurricane Helene hit North Carolina, and they did not have a lot of warning, and they were up very steep mountains. And I cannot imagine the chaos if everybody had tried to get a tractor, which I guess is what it would take to move their house simultaneously. We’re entering the realm of very rapid climate catastrophes.

Rachel: Yes, we are indeed. And resilience is becoming increasingly key in our conversations. And then if we were to look at tiny houses that we’re planning to build up in Sea Mills in Bristol, those are more permanent because we need to raise finance to pay for them, because none of us have a load of money to do this. We’re needing to borrow a lot of money, but in order to borrow the money, what you build needs to be mortgageable. So it needs to be permanent enough. So the solution we’ve come to is screw pile foundations, which are very light on the ground and can be removed. So literally giant screws that go into the land and you can remove them if necessary. You can also create space to put your rainwater harvesting containers underneath, etc. So and then when we were designing our homes up in Sea Mills and talking with consultants, we realised that if we built them as a terrace, you’re using much less materials.

Manda: Because you share common walls.

Rachel: That’s right, yes. And also you’re more heat efficient as well because you’re sharing some heat. Less walls for heat to escape through. And in a city on a brownfield site, that makes sense. Because the central government, local government are all talking about higher densities, there are some areas of Bristol which is currently very low density homes. So we’re finding those infill sites and using Materials very wisely. There are four buildings already on the site that we have preferred developer status on, and apart from the asbestos, we’ll be reusing all of the materials that are there. And that represents a huge carbon saving as well. And we recently had a meeting with the climate minister who happens to be our local MP Kerry McCarthy.

Manda: Oh that’s handy.

Rachel: Yeah. And she’s very excited about what we’re doing and she also agrees that circular construction has been very overlooked. So part of our exemplar of with our project is how do we do this. And then in terms of decision making, that’s been a very key part for us. We decided some years ago to use a system called Sociocracy, and it’s based on circles and people sitting in a circle, which we’ve been doing for thousands of years as human beings. Sitting around a fire perhaps, discussing current issues and topics. And it enables us to bring in our metaphor of the maypole really beautifully because our vision, mission and aims, which Sociocracy helps us hold, become our maypole. So each of our working circles has a set of aims that it’s responsible for achieving. And it also has a territory of decision making domain. So power is devolved to that circle. So that circle can then make its own decisions within that domain and to further the aims of that circle. Then everybody’s really clear what territory of decision making do we have power with, and then what are the aims within that that we have the power to make decisions on and to further and progress?

Manda: So can you give us a couple of examples of what those domains might be?

Rachel: Yeah. So one of our circles is funding and banking circle. So that is all about money. And the domain is very simple, it’s one word: money. And our aims are, for example, to raise funding, to manage our cash flow, to manage our bank accounts, to put together our annual accounts et cetera, et cetera. And also how we’re going to raise money to either buy land or raise money to pay for everything that goes along with creating a tiny house regenerative settlement.

Manda: Are you also then defining how that money is spent? Because money is one of the crucial sticking points, I would have said, to any kind of coherent community because it confers power. And if you are basically the Treasury,going No, you can’t spend extra on the composting toilets because we don’t have it, sorry, then you define everything. How do you manage that?

Rachel: So that’s really fascinating question. And again it comes back to the aims. So if for example we made a decision with regards to money and somebody else in the community who’s not in the funding and banking circle was to say, oh, that doesn’t sit well with me. Can we talk about it? Then we would go back to the aims of our circle and look deeper into is this decision that we’ve just made in line with the aims and domains of this circle? Or does it feel like it’s a bit of a grey area? And also we see each member of our community as being a nerve ending out into the world and into their own inner world. So we see that as information that’s coming in to us, that we see as a gift, not as a nuisance or as a challenge per se, but as a gift. And that somebody has sensed something that we might need to look at in more detail or talk through more together. And anybody’s welcome to come and join any circle meeting as well, but they won’t have decision making powers. So that’s one element of how we can help with the harmonious nature of things. And then each month the leaders and delegates from each working circle come together in a general circle. The delegates feed in the information on what’s been happening, what decisions have been made, and then the leaders listen to all the other delegates and bring information back to the working circle. So there’s a two way information flow; we’re helping everybody understand what’s happening in the organism of Tiny House Community Bristol and each sort of organ of the organism shows up to the monthly general circle and reports back.

Manda: Are these in person or are they on zoom? And does it make a difference?

Rachel: As much as possible in person, and I think it does make a difference. Yeah. So in a nutshell, that’s sociocracy. And then there are lots of processes around how you co-create proposals in the circle, and you go from one person to the next, to the next to the next in the circle. And because you know you have your time to speak, you can sit back and relax and listen more deeply and more actively to the person who’s speaking. And it doesn’t matter if all of you have a different opinion. The beauty of Sociocracy is that with the help of the facilitator, who has some training, we’re able to sense into where the commonalities are and then we’re able to ask people, what is your range of tolerance around this proposal? And you can hear everybody’s preference. So my preference might be a green wall in the common house, but my range of tolerance is also for yellow and orange. Yeah. And then the magic happens with identifying where everyone’s ranges of tolerance overlap. And this is where the harmony is created. And this is where the internal flexibility of hearing other opinions and other voices develops. And that muscle of it’s okay if somebody has a different opinion, I can listen to it and not feel triggered. And I can integrate it into this proposal; it’s all okay. And this is how we share power together.

Manda: Right. And my very limited experience with Sociocracy is that concept of not disagreeing. We don’t all have to agree, but once we’ve got the proposal that best establishes our common ground, it’s is this good enough for now? Safe enough to try? And if everybody agrees to that, then it’s not that I agree wholeheartedly that a green wall is beautiful, it’s that I don’t disagree. And we’ll try it. And if we all go, God, you know what? We don’t like living with a green wall after all, then we can go back to the principle again. And very few things are completely irrevocable, it seems to me, in these things. And that this is how we build community. And I was really struck when Maddy was speaking, that building community came before being safe in the construction of the tiny house community.

Manda: So Maddy, Rachel was saying that you’ve got the climate change Minister, she’s your local MP and clearly you’ve got some support from the city council, perhaps from the county council, whatever regional government is around there. In an ideal world, what support would they offer you? If you could ask for anything, what would you get? And what’s the disparity? What are you actually being offered?

Maddy: It’s a great question. There’s an interesting dissonance between the political support that we have and the officer level support that we have. So the mechanisms of the local authority are not set up to enable community led housing or community led anything much. And we’re inviting our local authority into a space that they’re not familiar with when they’re working with us as a community led housing organisation more aligned with the Commons. A space that is outside state control or state provision and outside market provision. So that’s the kind of challenge for the structures and the hierarchies and the sort of mechanisms and the processes that are the bureaucracies that make things in the public sector slow and heavy and risk averse. And we understand that there’s been huge chronic underinvestment in public sector, so it’s also on the back foot and under-resourced, has very little capacity to work, perhaps as creatively as it would like with groups like ours. So I think there is an understanding and people at the the politician level locally, really understand what we’re doing and how it actually hits all of their targets.

Manda: That’s good.

Maddy: And there should be tiny house communities. It’s an incredible response to how do we develop our city, how do we have more housing in the city from here? How do we make the best use of infill sites and brownfield sites, awkward sites, tricky sites? And we’ve been given or are hoping to get planning permission on a council site which has a lot of constraints. No other developer wanted it. Even the council’s own housing development company doesn’t want it. And so that’s the type of of site that community led housing organisations like ours so far have been offered. But we’re like the first wave of groups to come forward under the council’s policy to dispose of its land to community led housing groups. We knew that we were stepping into this uncharted territory with the council, and we did it because it needs to happen. We’re interested to see how the public sector can respond in this space, and it is really challenging for them and therefore very challenging for us as well.

Manda: Can I ask, you say you’re hoping to get planning permission, so if I’ve heard correctly, this is a piece of land that actually nobody else wants and nothing else will be done with it, it’ll just turn into a wasteland. And yet they haven’t just gone here, planning permission, have it, now. Why not?

Maddy: It’s a really good question. They should be biting our hand off, is my feeling.

Manda: You’d have thought. Rachel, you were about to say something.

Rachel: Yeah, that this space is really alive at the moment with central government.

Manda: This is as in Westminster? For people outside the UK we need to define; so central government is the national government. Okay. When you say really alive, you mean they’ve actually switched on to the fact that this is a good thing?

Rachel: In a way, yes. I mean, I cringe every time I hear our chancellor talk about economic growth. However, when she talks about building on brownfield sites, is central government’s, Westminster’s priority, that makes me feel hopeful. And then when I hear that they’re going to remove planning barriers to enable development on brownfield sites to happen, and to be rubber stamped, that makes me feel even more excited. So the movement seems to be in the direction of yes, if you put forward a proposal for some brownfield land, then with a few tweaks, just go for it. Just get on with it. Do it.

Manda: Okay, so back to Maddy. Brownfield land, for people not in the UK, brownfield land is is basically city land. It’s not actual greenfields and it’s been built on before, but there’s nothing on it just now. Is that right?

Maddy: Yeah, that’s the general definition. It’s not like a city park or allotments or anything. It’s previously developed land.

Manda: And this is a priority now is let’s develop on here if we can. And tiny houses are going to be good because you create more homes than if you build a seven bedroom mansion for one person who happens to have a lot of money. That makes sense. But they’re still not rubber stamping it because… Why are they so slow? It sounds to me, from what I understand of your city, Bristol, it’s got a really switched on city council compared to some of the other places, like where we live, where everybody’s over 80 and they still think they’re in the 1860s. You guys seem to have a city council that actually gets that we’re in the 21st century and things need to change. Why is it so slow?

Maddy: Well, I would say that it’s what’s happening in the community that defines that reputation for Bristol and not necessarily the council. Although there’s a lot more Green party people in local government, in the council now. We’re moving to a committee system off the mayoral system.

Manda: Okay. The people around the rest of the world probably don’t need to know; it’s still stuck in bureaucracy, basically.

Maddy: Yeah. Why are they not biting our hand off?

Manda: Stuck in bureaucracy is fine. If that’s the answer, then that’s the answer. Let’s move more into what could they do? Or is there anywhere in the world where there’s a city council or a local council that is the exemplar that’s doing amazing things? Or if you were able to go to your local council and go, look, we want this list of stuff, we want you to do this, and this is technically within your power, what would that list be?

Maddy: So I think it’s also not only about being stuck in bureaucracy, it is about ideology and the sort of slow reckoning culturally of public sector mindsets versus collaborative commons type mindsets, where you’re shifting from ‘the states and the markets provide’ to actually a situation where communities themselves have the greatest knowledge, the greatest need and the greatest energy. And public sector doesn’t yet know how to harness that energy, how to become an enabler rather than a provider. So there’s a cultural shift that needs to happen, and also they’re still under a lot of ‘business as usual’ narrative pressures. The West of England combined Authority’s is also very  economic growth orientated and so they have a lot of those business as usual pressures as well. So it’s this slow emergence that we need to help happen. We from the outside need to help them grow into this more commoning space. And it is a lot about mindsets of scarcity versus abundance and those sorts of things. I think if we were to have a list of asks, it would be something about access to land, access to sites that are more easily developable.

Manda: Yeah, right. Not the ones that nobody else wants. That would be good.

Maddy: Not the ones that nobody else wants. And the ones that make sense to us as community groups. So we live at the moment in the east of the city, and that’s where all our social networks are. So let’s find a piece of land that we can co-develop where we’re already rooted, rather than somewhere else. There’s also something about policies that can fast track these kind of schemes, so they don’t get stuck in the normal teeth, and the normal checks and balances of planning and so on. So if you had a policy, and we’re working under a framework called the Regenerative Settlement Framework, which is brilliant. If there was a policy that said if you, as a proposal for a development, if it meets all of the criteria of a regenerative settlement, according to this framework, then there’s a presumption that, yes, it’s great. And you go ahead.

Manda: What is a regenerative settlement then? Give us as much as you can without it being six pages, give us the edited highlight of what would count as a regenerative settlement.

Maddy: So it’s an approach to development which sees humans as part of the solution to the crises we face and not part of the problem. The framework can be applied at any level, any scale. So it can be like us for our 13 house cohousing community, but it can also be at a city wide level. It’s a lens that looks at all the different flows, different inputs and outputs, economic, social, ecological. And sees how human input and human creativity and ingenuity and love in that process can transform how we live together, and sort of the infrastructure, the spaces and all of those other kind of flows.

Manda: Rachel, you had your hand up.

Rachel: Yes, yes. Thank you. The Regenerative Settlement framework challenges the notion or challenges the assumption of mainstream planning policy, that people on the land is a bad thing. That’s what our current planning system messages to us day in and day out.

Manda: So greenfield sites are precious because there are no people on them?  And rewilding. The whole rewilding movement is get rid of the people and just leave the land to do its own thing.

Rachel: Yeah. So it challenges that and it brings forward actually to some a very challenging idea, that if you introduce people back onto the land in a way that regenerates the soil, that people can grow their own food and also supply their local communities. That they can build with nature and employ nature based solutions, renewable energy, rainwater harvesting, composting loos; negative carbon communities, you know. And people in the Amazon have been working with nature in this way for thousands and thousands of years.

Manda: And Australia and North America, all of these were managed landscapes, but they were managed with the land not imposed on the land. But they were a very different style of living. How do we do this in the 21st century?

Rachel: This is what we are innovating with and it’s about what does this place want to emerge? It’s about the context of our bioregion, our watershed, our local cultures or local economies. What does the land want? What does the local indigenous flora and fauna want? We’ve been evolving with them for millions of years. We have medicine all around us, if we will allow it. So this is for me one of the main philosophical pieces around the work that we do, is how do we re-indigenise in place? And therefore what do our homes look like? And I think the tiny house movement represents a way to minimise our harm to the world and begin to repair the harm that we’ve already done. So I think that that enables the lifeboats and the life rafts to take us into a more resilient future and to begin to rejoin the web of life in a bioregional way.

Manda: That’s so lovely. That really speaks to what this podcast is about. And my core question with this, because this is basically the core question that I ask myself every day. How do we shift from a trauma culture to an initiation culture? And my answer to that is that we have to listen to the web of life to give us our answer, because we don’t know what the Land wants and needs with our head minds. And as the climate is changing very rapidly, we don’t actually know what’s possible. It may be that I could plant a dozen oak trees up the hill, and by 50 years from now, oaks just can’t cope in what the climate is becoming. How do you see an interface between that kind of philosophy and the actual mechanics and logistics of building communities for people who desperately need houses. How do we bring these together? How do we actually make whatever we want to call indigeneity, connection to the web of life, real resilience happen in the 21st century? How are you going about making that happen?

Rachel: Many different ways. And I’m sure Maddy could speak to this beautifully. For me, it’s about very simply doing things called sit spots.

Manda: Right. John Young’s work.

Rachel: Yes. So sitting in nature and sensing into nature. So sitting under an oak tree, for example, being with the rest of nature. Because we are nature, we’re not in Nature. And also calling on what little indigenous knowledge still remains. Talking with elders of indigenous communities elsewhere to see what wisdom we can gain from them to apply here, or to integrate with the wisdom that we have here. And there are a lot of people already in the UK and around the world doing this work. I think Joanna Macy’s the Work that reconnects that’s really, really important. And also talking together about what comes up for you? And what comes up for you? It’s all about emergence, as Maddy was saying, about the fertile edges. It’s always in that space of emergence. And as Daniel Christian Wall says, it’s about living the questions. So it’s not about coming up with the answers. It’s about what are the questions that we’re living with right now? And how can we live into them, and then what more questions emerge from that? So for me, it’s about an accelerated human consciousness. Like a growth spurt of human consciousness into this space. And this is the really big and deep thinking that I do around this. And I know that many, many other people do too. And it’s incredible when you get together with other people how much similar thinking is happening. So collective consciousness.

Manda: And then how do we actually bring that into our governance systems so that they’re not still hooked up with business as usual and, and acting as a brake on what is otherwise quite a rapidly evolving edge. Maddy I’d love to hear your take on that. And I’d like to inject in, I’m sure you’re familiar with the work of Dark Matter Labs, and Indy Johar and his concept of the emergent edge of inter becoming. And within dark matter labs they have the concept of the autonomous house that has its own legal entity, and that that becomes another emergent edge of inter becoming. And I wonder, is that something that could be integrated into what you’re doing, or is it too much other and too likely to frighten the horses frankly? Maddy, thoughts on any of that.

Maddy: I wanted to say that I was recently listening to a couple of other of the podcasts. Your conversation with Michael Haupt and also with Doctor Jenny Goodman. And a lot of the things that I was hearing there were coming up, in my thoughts during this conversation, particularly with Michael.

Manda: Who’s working in South Africa; for people who haven’t listened to that podcast, I’ll put a link in the show notes. But he’s working a lot in South Africa about bringing people back to the land and creating community there.

Maddy: And that you and he were talking about the need to coordinate and bring together all the pieces of the jigsaw. That there are so many amazing things happening and so many things coming up in people individually and collectively around the world, all different scales. And the challenge now is how do we weave it together. And I think that that’s very much what we experience locally as well, that the work is about weaving relationships and about connecting with others that we relate to and resonate with on our journey. And he was talking about the need for small scale prototypes of things. That we need to play and test and try and fail and reform and do that together. And that’s very much the space that we’re in. We need to have these sort of prototypes that we can then point to, and there are many around the world, but having them locally to point to, to your local council or whatever it might be, to say, look, this is possible and this is possible, and here’s how they did it. That’s a really interesting model. Oh yeah, maybe that model could be replicable here. And what would we change to make it work better? And so you need to have those sort of early stage prototypes and pilots. And also to start to sort of infuse in the collective imagination; all of the people who are living hand to mouth and surviving, who don’t have the head space or the means to engage with all of the sort of conceptual or read long books, or even to understand a lot of the language around this work.

Maddy: And it’s really important not to end up flying off into this space and really ground it in the people with the need. That also those with the greatest need also generally have the least power. So it’s really always coming back to how do we reverse that, how do we shake that up? And you know, for us, Rachel and I, we’re both single moms in our 50s. We’re in our 50s now. My daughter’s 19. Maya’s what, 21? And so we we’re also here because of that as a guiding principle, is that how do I show up? How do I change the world for our daughters? But also how do I parent and how do I model in a way that helps our girls to navigate an increasingly kind of chaotic and confusing space? And to try to find clarity or coordinates. You know, points of orientation for them, or rootedness for them, as they try to navigate the world.

Maddy: So it’s also a very personal inquiry. And I’m sure that everyone around the world that is working on all this incredible emergent stuff is also doing it very much with an awareness about what it means internally for each of us. How we grow and learn as people, but also for those who are immediately around us, those we have responsibility for and love. So it’s that sort of huge scale and this very intimate scale of work all happening simultaneously. And what makes that exciting and not fearful, partly for me, is zooming out and thinking about these kind of natural cycles of emergence and decay that are part of nature’s cycles. And that we are part of that, and we’re on that wheel and we’re a work in progress and we’re screwing things up, and we’re suffering the consequences. And we haven’t worked out how to be in loving communion with our host planet and all of our co beings. We haven’t worked it out. We’re trying to work it out.

Manda: Well, some of us worked it out. I think indigenous cultures have it and our inheritance has it. It’s just our culture stopped and broke away from it and now we need to find our way back. It’s a slightly different narrative, I think.

Maddy: That’s it. And again, listening to your conversation with Michael Haupt and talking about the rise and fall of civilisations, and that there is a pattern, there is a rhythm. And that kind of helps in a way, to know that everything good is worth doing. Because it does change, it does matter energetically. It matters what we put in our attention, our intention into the world is manifesting what it becomes in every moment. Making choices day to day, but also these sort of big more conceptual ideas. It’s all part of the same journey.

Manda: Brilliant. Thank you. Rachel, we’re pretty much out of time. That was beautiful, Maddy, thank you. But you were nodding along there, and you’ve used the the life raft into life islands, which is really reminding me of Ilya Prigogine and small islands of coherence in the sea of chaos can lead the system to a higher order, which I’m sure you had at the back of your mind somewhere. Is there anything you would like to add as we close? Maddy we didn’t get to the urban agriculture. At some point we’ll have to come back on that, because I really want to know more about it. But Rachel, anything else that you wanted to say?

Rachel: Thank you. Yeah. I think Lastly, I wanted to speak to the work around trauma and how that can show up as we’re doing this work together. How we need to draw on our courage to not run away from conflict when it happens, but to lovingly step into it. And to remind ourselves that we’ve all been conditioned to quite a inherently violent system. And that that’s not our fault, that’s not anybody’s fault. We’re in a very entrenched system, the Algonquin tribe in Canada would call it Wetiko.

Manda: We’ve had an entire podcast on that. So. Yes.

Rachel: Amazing. So for me an equally important aspect of our work, is recognising all of that and working with it. And soon we’ll be doing a weekend retreat with an intentional community from Colombia called El Juego, who have formed around conflict transformation and trauma. And they’re doing a world tour and they’re coming to Bristol in November.

Manda: Oh, wow. Is that something that other people can come to or is that just for tiny House Bristol?

Rachel: Yes, it’s somewhat open.

Manda: And when is it?

Rachel: It’s on the 2nd and 3rd of November. And I think they’re going to London first. They’re in Portugal at the moment. So they’re working their way around. And I think that it’s absolutely incredible and really hopeful to me that an intentional community has formed around conflict, transformation and all that. And it’s been going for eight years. They say ‘we’re coming to play with you’, they talk about it in terms of play and radical empathy. And this, for me, is one of the most potent inquiries of our time, how we unlearn, how we unravel, how we forgive ourselves, forgive each other, open our hearts, open our minds. This is what is going to help us get to where we need to be getting to, the fastest as possible.

Manda: Yeah, this is the transformation from trauma culture to initiation culture, is doing that work alone with ourselves and with each other and with the web of life.

Rachel: Yeah, exactly.

Manda: How exciting. Okay, well, if it’s possible to have a link for that in the show notes, I will have it and put it there. And you probably have 10,000 people trying to sign up, but hey, we’ll see where we get to. All right. Oh, Maddie, you’ve got your hand up. This will have to be your last word, Maddy, but go for it.

Maddy: Well, I don’t know if you want to include it, but that same weekend is the Fearless Cities.

Manda: Is this another conference or workshop?

Maddy: Yeah. It’s coming to England for the first time on that same weekend. 1st to the 3rd of November.

Manda: People, it’s going to be a very busy weekend. Can we shuttle between the two? Where is it going to be?

Maddy: It’s in Sheffield. And the the heading is Reimagining Our Commons Through Neighbourhoods of Care.

Manda: Oh my gosh

Maddy: And this is about the sort of new municipalism I suppose, which sort of originated in Barcelona. So that’s how does our public sector begin to reimagine itself so that it opens up to enabling all of the good work that is trying to happen?

Manda: I want to come to both of those! And I’m supposed to be leading an event on the Sunday, so what the heck? Okay, we’ll work out somewhere. That sounds amazing. So definitely we’ll put the links in the show notes to both of those. Thank you both. Really, this has been fantastic. And it’s so inspiring to know that there are people with your depth and awareness and capacity for introspection and reflection and connection and thinking and creating the communities that can begin to change our relationship with the world around us. And the bureaucracies that might otherwise get in the way. Thank you so much, both of you for coming on to the Accidental Gods podcast. We will come back at some point.

Maddy: It’s been a great pleasure. Thanks, Manda.

Rachel: Thank you Manda.

Manda: There we go. That’s it for another week. Enormous thanks to Rachel and Maddy for the breadth and the depth of what they’re doing. For really living the change that we need to see in the world. For understanding that change starts inside, that it starts with a healing of our own trauma, of the traumas that we enact between us and on the rest of the more than human world. And that healing is possible, here, now, in a single generation, in our lifetimes, in a timescale that matters. We can do this. And it’s so encouraging to speak to people who are living this. So I put reams of links in the show notes. There are so many exciting things that Rachel and Maddy are engaged in, and some of them are local to Bristol, but all of them have implications wherever you are in the world. What matters more than anything at the moment is how we build community, and particularly given that over half the world lives in cities, how do we create living communities of place and of purpose? Places we can help each other, we can heal each other, we can feed each other in urban settings. So please do head off and check out the show notes. And then we will be back next week with another conversation. I am not going to say who, because the last time I said who, it immediately got cancelled. You will notice we did not have watershed investigations this week. I am hoping that will happen at a future podcast, but in the meantime, no more hostages to fortune.

Manda: But I do want to thank Caro C for the music at the head and foot. Alan Lowles of Airtight Studios for the production. Lou Mayor for the videos, Anne Thomas for the transcripts, Faith Tilleray for all of the tech that keeps us running and for the hours of conversation behind the scenes. And then, as ever, an enormous thanks to you for giving us your time and your attention, and for letting us enter into your thinking. If you know of anybody else who really wants to get deep into the nuts and bolts of how we find the most essential things in life, connection with each other and a warm, dry, safe place to live, then please do send them this link. And if you still have time and you’re still here, five stars, a review and subscribing on the podcast provider of your choice apparently really does make a difference to how we’re seen in the world. And it would be good to reach lots more people. How else are we going to change the ways people think? So head off there, click a bunch of buttons and the world will be a good place. And finally, really, I am about to stop. But just before I go, I wanted to say a huge thanks to all of the people who came to Wigan Literary Festival. I was there last Saturday at the time of recording, and it was so lovely to see so many people who listened to the podcast. Thank you. It was a grand and beautiful Saturday morning. I really enjoyed it and I hope you did too. So there we go. Really, this time I’m done. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.

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